


We Called Ourselves a Different Name

by Amariah Moor (Inksinger), Inksinger



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Demon Hunters, Demons, Gen, Humans are Bastards, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-26 01:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30098205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Amariah%20Moor, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Inksinger
Summary: Written in response to a prompt found on Facebook: "You are a demon that has had several failed attempts on your life by demon hunters. No matter how they use their holy powers they cannot harm you and as a result they consider you extremely powerful. In truth, the holy powers don't harm you for the simple reason that you aren't actually evil."
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Slapping this here so it doesn't get lost in my phone. Not sure if I'll continue it or not; let me know what you think!

"'Not evil'?" The hunter's voice rang out harshly in the shadows. "Don't play with me, demon. All your kind are evil. It's in your name, for Chrissake."

The man tilted his head thoughtfully, painted lips twisting upwards into a thin, tired smile. This latest hunter was old, and bore scars from countless battles with other so-called monsters. Clever and strong, then - and yet still every bit as naïve as all the rest.

"I am not the one who named my kind," he told her quietly. Long nails skittered gingerly about the shaft embedded in his though. "We had a name for ourselves, once. A true name, that meant something real. A name that fit our people."

"You aren't 'people'," the woman snorted. "You're monsters. We let you live, and you'll keep preying on humanity forever."

"How swiftly the youngest children deem their elders monstrous." The man sighed, long tail twitching behind him. "This world did belong to us, once, long before humanity was borne unto it. Our ancestors taught yours the art of speech. Guided their hands in the learning of the old letters. You were welcomed into this world you seek to chase us out of."

"I've heard the lies before," the woman snapped. "Every other wolf and bat and skink spits the same poison."

Gold-dusted eyes twitched at that. It had been a few years since he last encountered a hunter who knew all the old slurs - longer still, since he last met one brave enough to say them to his face.

"If so many of us say it," he said slowly, "then why has it never occurred to you that we are telling you the truth?"

For the first time, the woman's face showed hesitation. Her grip on her consecrated crossbow loosened; the bolt lowered an inch or so from where it was before, so that it would take his cheek rather than his eye if she should fire.

Tiny changes, all of them occurring in the space of several minutes since he first went down. A younger creature would have missed them.

Between the pain and the stench of death in the air, he's surprised he noticed them at all.

"You're liars," she said. "Every one of you. Everyone knows that. Why the hell should I believe any of you?"

The man pushed himself upright against the wall, grimacing as the effort sent pain searing through his leg.

"Because we are dying out," the man said. "There was a time when the dead were honored - even among humans. If nothing else," he added softly, "at least you could suffer looking into what we say, and discovering for yourself where the truth of our shared histories lies."

"And how should I do that?" The woman's face was hardening again. She must have realized her aim had faltered, for after another moment she jerked her crossbow back into position and added, "Ain't gonna go prancin' up to any demon and ask them."

"What do those do?" the man asked. He'd only been hit in the leg; the taste of blood on his tongue was only a hallucination, one he was familiar with after so many near-death encounters. He still struggled to ignore it.

"What?" the woman asked. "What does what do?"

"The bolts," he explained. "Consecrated, yes? What effect does that have on the wicked?"

The woman opened her mouth to answer... and stopped. And stepped back almost absently, as the outrage in her expression slowly bled away into confusion.

"It's supposed to torch you," she said after a moment. "You're - you're supposed to be—"

"On fire?" he finished quietly. "Perhaps already reduced to a pile of fine ash?"

The woman frowned. This time, when she lowered her crossbow, she seemed to do so on purpose.

"What the hell," she breathed.

The man chuckled, and for the first time the woman flinched.

"You're a demon," she said. For all she spoke to him, she seemed to be trying to convince herself. "Demons are evil - this - these should have worked on you already."

"Demons are evil, yes," the man agreed. He wanted to sound angry. Bitter, perhaps. What came out sounded more like disappointment. "But we were not the ones who named ourselves so. Your people learned from us, and then they went into seclusion - and came out again, and named us demons, and declared that we were all of us the very worst abominations to ever walk this planet you have stolen."

The woman was shaking her head. As he watched, she took another step back from him.

"We did not name ourselves demons," he said again. "We still do not. That is the name your kind have given us, to justify our slaughter. To make it easier to sleep at night," he added softly, "after you have finished butchering whole covens for crimes most likely carried out by your own neighbors."

The crossbow didn't clatter to the ground - she merely dropped it to her side, pulling her finger away from the trigger as she backed up once more. There was something small and lonely in her eyes, though he thought she seemed much too hard to truly weep, let alone in front of anyone.

"You're monsters," she said softly. "We did what... what we had to do."

"What you were told to do," he corrected her gently. "Tell me - how many of the others ever actually committed any of the crimes for which you executed them?"


	2. Chapter 2

He had been an orphan for well over a hundred years - the only surviving member of his coven, and only by whatever grace or curse had allowed him to be safely away from the den when hunters had fallen on his family.

(Some days, when the wind grew cold and bitter, he found himself wishing he had followed the scent of blood away from the wreckage and chased those hunters down. Not because he thought he might have avenged the coven on them, though perhaps he might have done. But those hunters were many and raw still with their savagery, and death, perhaps, would have found him in the carnage.)

(Some days it was hard to recall what reason he still had to go on surviving. He had already long forgotten why he didn't end himself among the corpses of his brethren - certainly the hunters had left enough debris behind to make the task an easy one.)

Others of his kind would have joined a new coven, or looked for other orphans with whom they could create a family of their own. He had thought of that, at first - but the pain of his loss, and the memory of beloved faces ruined and frozen in eternal fear, chased him away each time he drew too near to any others. He had been a child when his life was broken; a century later, he still awakened screaming in the night, cursing whatever god had turned away from his coven - or damned them outright.

And - _why?_

He knew the answer. Of course he knew. But his heart did not cease its bleeding, and his mind held fast about the memories that tortured him, and _why_ had become a word burned permanently into his rotted, broken tongue.

His people called themselves the dancers, in the old tongue. Others had names like theirs - the singers, the weavers, the seers, the fliers. On and on, a litany of names for what they were and what they loved most dearly. In the world before humanity, there had been color and harmony. Not peace - never that - but neither the threat of genocide or persecution. Shoulders bumped, hackles lifted, but war was rare and murder all but unheard of. They had held this world for eons, and learned to coexist upon it.

Humanity had been the war-bringers.

The infants, the old tongue named them - not an insult but an acknowledgement, for they were the youngest and had ever been the softest of the kindreds, lacking the strength and speed and cleverness of their elders.

Or… so it had seemed, at first.

Somehow, darkness had found them. Jealousy. Fear. Spite. Humanity pulled away from the elder races and became hidden, only to emerge centuries later as conquerors and butchers. The world they had been promised a fair share of became all theirs for the taking, and their aggression and skill in war took the eldest fatally off guard.

Little by little, humanity purged the elder races from the planet, driving once mighty empires to ruin and running the survivors into hiding, giving them twisted, cruel names as though the name alone would make monsters of the eldest races - werewolves, vampires, fairies, merfolk, on and on, until the old tongue became lost to their own histories. Only then did humanity turn its ravenous fangs inward on itself, leaving the rest to cower and learn to live in secrecy and shadow.

Demons, they called the dancers. Demons. Wicked filth. _Skinks._ The hunters took the tails and eyes and teeth and scalps of his people as trophies, chopped them off of still-warm bodies and plucked them out of still-screaming faces to preserve and sell as trinkets to their fellows in their stinking, ugly little cities.

(Tails became whips and belts. Eyes and teeth were jarred or strung on twine for luck. Hair was sold and processed for use in costume wigs and trim on singer-pelt coats. Or worse: All of these, preserved and displayed in grisly trophy hoards. Museums to the extinction of the race that had invented song-stepping.)

So had they butchered his coven. So had he found his parents, and his siblings, and their sister-kinfolk in the burnt and broken remnants of the den, so many years ago.

He had been a child. He had died that night, and what rose after him had been a cold and broken thing, unable even to despise humanity for what it stole from him. There was no heart left in him to break; how, then, could he know hatred, when the very thought of feeling anything again left him so utterly exhausted?

Emptiness was better. That was what he told himself, all throughout the century that followed. Hollowness was a different suffering than hatred, than grief, than fear. It was better that he died that night. He would not survive the pain of coming back to life again.

When hunters came, he eluded them. When they persisted - as they always did - he ended them in ways that could not be traced back to the eldest, futile though he knew his efforts were.

He convinced himself he did not feel. Not when the hunter was a child sent out on his first mission. Not when the hunters were lovers, and their deaths left their daughter orphaned just like he had been. Certainly not when he failed to save others from the hunters and their dogs.

It was funny, in the way that botched funerals and couplings interrupted by sudden tragedies were funny: For a little while, he had almost started to believe himself.

But a dead thing would not seek to educate the first hunter to have him dead to rights. A dead thing would not care enough to try.


End file.
